Participant

Question

Best Quality Exporting From HDV to DVD

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
June 16, 2009
8 replies
58026 views

I've searched on the web & gotten a few answers, but nothing seems to solve the situation.

What I've tried.

1920x1080p MPEG2, Quality 5, Min, Target, Max All Set To 60. Came out looking like crap when it was put on a dvd. Noisy, over contrasted (could be the tv), over colored (could be the tv).

720x480 MPEG2-DVD, Quality 5, Min, Target, Max All Set To 9. Came out looking worse then my previous attempt.

Anyone have a secret formula for HDV to DVD conversion?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Dragonspear

Participating Frequently

Anyone know if this all still applies after the CS6 release. So far, I've been impressed with the new scaling.

I created graphics in both HD and SD, and then exported both in SD mp2.

Suprisingly, CS6 graphics scaled from HD to SD looked sharper than those created natively in SD!

...I'm curious how the new CS6 scaler results compare to Mr. Isaac's method.

E

excited_Genie16B8

Legend

Things actually improved significantly with CS5, making Dan's method largely unnecessary. (Especially now if you have hardware acceleration.)

Dan Isaacs

Participating Frequently

Um, I don't know about CS6 ... but I find the scaling in CS5 to be not

as good as the scaling method in my workflow; at least for my taste.

More important, the deinterlacing quality is not nearly as good as that

in hd2sd(), so if you have a 1080i source, my workflow will generally

yield far superior results.

Furthermore, for noisy sources, hd2sd's noise reduction settings can

drastically improve the conversion quality and compressibility.

Again, I am only talking about CS5. I have not used cs6 so I have no idea.

J

jimbell

Participant

I am posting here because Dan Isaacs appears to frequent this posting. I am still using Premiere CS3 and would like to try out the debugmode frameserver along with hd2sd. I have seen many references to that workflow, but I have not been able to find the workflow document. Can someone point me to it?

Thanks

Ann Bens

Community Expert

http://invertedhorn.axspace.com/hdv2dvd_basic.html

the_wine_snob

Inspiring

Ann,

Thanks for the link. All of my bookmarks were coming up dead - again! Maybe I need to create a site for the great posts from the Adobe fora?

Hunt

M

medi-ochre

Participant

With you there, but Cs5 won't have this, you can bet your moneys on that. Whatsmore, maximum render quality is a joke. I have just rendered a 3 minute video, 32 bit colour with max quality and it took 1 hour 30. Im sure if i had a render farm, it wouldnt matter but I don't and my computers far from slow, overclocked E6400, 3gb memory. That said, AVCHD is the satan of rendering, if they compress video anymore we might start making tiny 'black holes' in our computers.

Jeff Bellune

Legend

You can spend your time rendering in Premiere using MRQ, or you can spend your time putting together a free, fast, high-quality solution. You decide.

-Jeff

Curt Wrigley

Inspiring

Jeff,

Next time you do your test; throw in some progressive source.

Unscientifically; Ive reached the same conclusions as you (dissapointed in Adobe's on board solution still).

But i recently shot a gig in HDV progressive and found the scaling down of progressive footage much better than interlaced footage. Not sure if this is really very helpful to a lot of folk; but its an indicator that the scaling of interlaced footage is much more diffcult to do right.

Curt

R

RainbowUnicorn13

Participating Frequently

I cheat when I convert anything to DVD.

I bought 'ConvertX to DVD'. I set the encoding to highest quality 2 pass fit to 1 4.35GB dvd. I then add the (anyvideo includng HDV). I hit the Convert button and I have the highest quality DVD I can get in less than an hour. I can add HDV clip, .mov clip, .avi clips and convert them all to 1 DVD if I want very quickly. For higher quality or long (over 2 hr videos) you can also set it to create a dual layer DVD if needed but a single L dvd usually is more than sufficient.

You can select whether to crop or use letterbox or not lose any video, there are many settings.

I do have Adobe MC installed but Adobe IS NOT the best conversion software by a long shot.

You can save the DVD to your HD or burn as many DVD's as you wish.

ConvertX to DVD is a conversion program only and is the easiest and fastest method for conversion that I have found. I also installed a few codec packs (like all codecs I could find) as needed when required.

Dan Isaacs

Participating Frequently

NEW VERSION of hd2sd() package for AviSynth:

Changes include:

Automatically handling of MPEG-2 I-frame .m2v + .wav exports from Premiere Pro. You can now simply use:

hd2sd("myfilename.m2v", OutputColorSpace="YUY2", OutputBFF=true)
Added new deinterlacers, now uses Yadif (DeintMethod=3) by default. Also added a high-quality deinterlacer (using NNEDI2 + Yadifmod) that can be used by specifying DeintMethod=0
Better optimization for AviSynth MT
Added new WidescreenType options. There's no more need to set OutputWidescreen=false … just use WidescreenType=-1 [crop] or WidescreenType=-2 [letterbox]
Conforming input framerates to exact broadcast specs (such as 24000/1001, 30000/1001, 60000/1001 for NTSC and exactly 25 or 50 fps for PAL) to avoid audio sync loss or dropped frames on long encodes. This is done by slightly slowing down or speeding up the audio as needed. Audio is resampled back to the original rate, but you can override this using OutputAudioRate=44100, for example to force 44.1kHz.
Better automatic handling of input PAR. hd2sd() now correctly detects the PAR all major HD formats.
Added InputPAR and OutputPAR parameters to override automatic assumptions
hd2sd now works well (when interlaced_out=false and OutputFieldRate is set as needed) for internet output (such as 640x360 @ 30p)
Moved dependent plugins to subfolders (such as C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\ConditionalSmoothBob ) ; most plugins are loaded on demand instead of AviSYnth startup.

And more, of course… but these are the big changes that come to mind now.

-- Dan

S

spreeni

Participating Frequently

thank you Dan, I'm very curious about these new deinterlace modes. I will test and report.

A

Anonymous

I Downconvert in Adobe After Effects with Matrox HD AVI files.

Steps:

1. Open a new untitled AE project

2. Bring in the Exported Matrox HD AVI file.

3. Go to the Interpret the footage Menu: Ctrl-Alt-G on CS4

4. On the Fields and Pull Down Box, enable the Preserve edges (best quality)

5. Create a new sequence and change the length to match your clip lenght.

6. Drag your clip into the sequence and press "S" to scale the clip to the sequence size.

7. Add to render que and select MPEG-2 DVD and choose appropriate Bitrate settings.

8. Render out to MPEG 2 and bring into Encore for burning.

Promter

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the additional option Laura,

With Dan's intructions I just selected MPEG2 and the preset took.

I was selecting MPEG2-DVD before and that's why it wasn't working.

Hopefully the rest of the process goes smooth. I shall return.

thanks again!

Promter

Participating Frequently

Hello all,

This post is great and filled with super great information.
A lot of it a little bit over my level of pixel breakdown, color sampling, and luma levels understanding but that's ok I don't want to get that deep into it yet.

On the other hand I came to the board looking for not the best quality settings but the easiest and fastest.

The particular project that I'm trying to export onto DVD does not need to be in the best possible quality.

It will be watched at home by my client and his family on their hd set but it's an event where his daughter was singing a few songs and he wanted it on DVD.

So here's the thing, I shot this on my Panasonic HVX200A at 720p / 24fps on the P2 Card.

I dragged and dropped the P2 Content in a folder I made on my desktop for this project on my dell laptop.

I'm done with the edit on CS4. It's a 23minute timeline total.

The sequence settings for my timeline is 23.976 and match the pixel aspect ratio of my footage of 960x720 / 1.333 the timeline started off yellow to begin with the whole time, hmmm...? I don't know if this is because I should have selected a straight 24fps timeline to match the footage. (but anyway that's another topic)

As for now here is where I need help.

I'm new to CS4.
On CS3 I used to export to encore and done!

Well... CS4 Does not have that option when I go to "export"
So I read somewhere that the easiest thing was to export to EDL and in ENCORE import EDL and my Premiere timeline would open in ENCORE.
I have tried that a few times and can't figure this thing out.

I have ENCORE CS4 and it's my first time to use it. I did use ENCORE CS3 before.

Can someone please tell me the easiest way to put my project on a DVD with this new CS4 stuff?

Also if you guys think I should start this topic on a new thread all together please let me know as well.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Jeff Bellune

Legend

"Easiest" is to use Dynamic Link to add your Pr sequence to the En SD DVD project. Put it in a timeline and build the project. Done.

Unfortunately, the finished disc will have issues:

The frame rate will get converted incorrectly by Encore and it will stutter and jump on camera pans and cross-frame motion.
The quality of the scaling from HD to SD will be well below average, and you will lose a lot more of the original HD quality than you should (maybe even to the point of sucking out loud).

The "best" way to do it in CS4 is:

Nest your finished HD sequence in a progressive 24p SD sequence and scale it down appropriately. Set the SD sequence to Maximum Render Quality. That ensures that the AME will encode with MRQ, which triggers Premiere's high-quality scaling algorithm. The downside to MRQ is the render time. I get about 4 - 5 fps on an 8-core, 16 GB RAM Vista 64 machine with all 8 cores pegged during rendering.
Export the SD sequence to MPEG2-DVD. Start with the NTSC Widescreen High Quality 23.976 preset and adjust the video encoding parameters to reflect an appropriate target, min and max bit rate. For your 23-minute program, setting min to 3.5 Mbps, target to 7 Mbps and max to 8 Mbps should produce very nice results. If you have quality media, a quality burner with up-to-date firmware and you burn at no more than 1/2 the rated speed of the blank media, you can probably get away with a target bit rate of 8 and a max of 9. Set the GOP to M=12 and N=3. You can encode your audio to AC3 either in the AME or in Encore.
After you've had time to watch the entire extended version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the finished .m2v and .wav (.ac3) files will be ready to import into En. Make sure the .m2v (and the .ac3, if you chose that format) imports into En as "Don't Transcode". Add them to a timeline and build the project.

Your results won't be as spectacular as using Dan's hd2sd() script, but they'll be pretty darn good nonetheless.

-Jeff

Promter

Participating Frequently

Wow Jeff,

that's some pretty awesome stuff!

but really what is the easiest way? naaa... I'm just kidding!

I will most definitely use Dan's workflow on 90% of my projects I'm sure but as for this one I'll try it your way.

Nesting into an SD timeline and rescaling hmmm... didn't think about that.

Actually what I thought was that exporting my HD timeline the AME would just convert it to SD when selecting MPEG2-DVD on the encoder drop down templates.

I'm glad I posted the question because I wasn't really sure and I do want to keep at least some decent quality on this

As to rendering time, the first thing I was able to get my hands on was the Matrix collection and that thing has about 8 DVDs!

so I think I'm ready

The second thing I have is a second laptop for these situations. Yes I bought 2 just because of renders.

So... with that said, I think I'm going to go ahead and give this a swirl and see what comes up.

Thank you so many millions of times.

-Promter-

Dan Isaacs

Participating Frequently

I have lots of ideas for HDV -> DVD conversions and I am surprised that you have been unable to locate any of my workflows on the Premiere forums.

I can try to help you, but I need to know a few things first:

What is the exact format that you footage was shot in? I am assuming it was 1440c1080 @ 30p. Is this correct?
Do your sequence settings match that of your footage (dimensions, framerate, field options, etc)
You mention that you tried to output 1920x1080/30p for DVD. Does this mean that you ouput this as an "intermediary" and let Encore transcode it automatically?

D

DNA ImageryAuthor

Participant

I apologize as I've searched google & not these forums (although that seems intelligent now, hah).

1. 1440x1080 60i original footage, should I be shooting in 30p for DVD conversion?

2. Yes.

3. I tried to output to 1920x1080/30p thinking it would give optimal quality, but I was clearly wrong. I exported straight from Premiere to Encore to be transcoded.

I am a bit new to doing the DVD thing b/c I do web episodes, so I just upload to web 99% of the time and it looks great, but this DVD conversion is just coming out terrible. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Dan Isaacs

Participating Frequently

Try this:

On the Premiere CS4 end of things:

Download these Adobe Media Encoder CS4 presets for 100Mbps MPEG-2 I-frame 4:2:2
Export your 1440x1080 60i timeline using the corresponding preset from the ones above; this will create a (very large) .m2v file and .wav file

Now some freeware tools to get the conversion done properly:

Download and install the Lagarith lossless codec
Download and install VirtualDub
Download and install AviSynth
Download and install my hd2sd() conversion package for AviSynth (instructions for installation are in the .zip file)

Create a new blank text document in notepad, like such, and save this file as premiere.avs, and save it to the same folder as your .m2v and .wav file (edit the video and audio parameters to match your filenames). This is your "script" file for AviSynth:

video = "myfile.m2v"

audio = "myfile.wav"

FFMpegSource(video)

(audio == "") ? last : AudioDub(WavSource(audio))

hd2sd(OutputColorSpace="YUY2", OutputBFF=true)

Run VirtualDub
Open your premiere.avs file in VirtualDub
In VirtualDub, go to Video : Compression and select the Lagarith lossless codec
Also set VirtualDub to use Video : Fast recompress mode
Save your output to lagarith.avi
Import lagarith.avi into Encore for transcoding and authoring

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded